Category Archives: repulsion

This post is different from yesterday’s lighthearted post about guinea pigs. I live in a strange society. Americans were thankful on Thanksgiving for the bounty they recieved from the gods. On Black Friday, they tore through the aisles of stores everywhere. People are fascinated by zombies and still repelled by Death. They try to delay old age, using creams and surgeries. Maybe we are not meant to be living to a certain age. Certainly we are not meant to be denying age and change in our bodies.

I do not like zombies. But lots of other people do. Movies have been made about zombies attacking innocent people. I don’t watch those movies but the movies are popular with many people. Zombies, like ghosts, represent death in a way. They embody death. But women flock to counters in department stores for face creams that guarantee to make them look young to deny age.

Death is inevitable. It will happen eventually. It is “a natural part of life, one that we all must take.” (Gandalf, Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien.) I agree with this. But for all that we have explored deep space, the oceans, and galaxies, death remains to us an enigma, a mystery, the last unexplored frontier. We cannot all experience death and then return to report what it is like. It is final. It is death’s finality that freaks people out and makes them turn to surgeries and the creams, etc.

I saw the first snowflakes of the season yesterday. Winter is upon us. This is the time of the Crone. The Crone who does not fear death, she represents Death itself. But the Crone in our society is overlooked, pushed aside, and forgotten. A different god is honored now- the gods of the cosmetic surgeries who are earning millions of the vulnerabilities of women. Not all women use the creams but many do. We have forgotten much. I know some women in a coven who are older and experienced in life and seem to know and handle so much, they consistently surprise me. That is the essence of being the Crone- a sagacity that was hard earned. It must be valued though, not just by her, but by people.

We need to listen to her secrets, whispered on the wind, and in our ears. We need to listen inside our hearts and listen as a collective. Winter is the time to turn inward and in hibernation, take time to do the things we didn’t get done this fall, to reflect on what we have accomplished, and how we have changed and grown over the last year. We can decide what we should do new for the coming year. Then we will truly grow and develop.

That time will come. Everything will change. The next turn of the Wheel of the Year is Imbolc. The time of the Maiden and the first early stirrings of spring. We must weather this time of winter and the long cold stretch before us. Let us hope we weather it as the Crone would, made of steel and grace.